Stump Grinding – Should I rent one?

Should I rent a Stump Grinder or Pay?

There are a lot of ways that you can get rid of stumps in the land that you clear. One,You can pay to have them removed. Two, You can dig them out. Three, You can burn them or even drill them and let them rot. After clearing our property, I tried to determine what best fit my situation. I had over 400 stumps ranging from 4″ across to 36″ across. A bulk of what we had were the 10-24′ size.

The Dilemma

View of what we faced.

I had to finish getting the yard cleared and the stump grinding done to enable our builder to bring in the dirt for our house pad. with the time crunch, I had no time for the burn out, or rot out method. I also had already rented a small backhoe to dig out the stumps where the slab was actually going. There were about 20 or so in the slab area, and it took 2 days to get those dug out, and made a heck of a mess. So I knew that digging wasn’t an option either.

Towards the front, Flags are prepped stumps

Option 1

My first option was to pay someone to come out and remove or grind the remaining stumps. Stump grinding in my area cost about $15-$25 each when doing this many. This still added up to almost 7-10K. As a result, I needed to find a more economical way to get the stump grinding done. SO, I continued to research options.

Option 2

Rent a stump grinder and grind them myself. Well, I had never seen or used a stump grinder before. I had never used a backhoe before either, and I figured that out, so why not look into this option. So, I called all of the local rental yards, and the all had smaller stump grinders like the DR stump grinder. I went and looked at these, and did research on the internet, and decided that these were not big enough at all to do what I needed to do. Seems like I needed more power.

The Choice

I found a Barreto 30 SG for rent . Believe it or not I found at at a Home Depot Rental center. With insurance and tax it rented for about $300 a day. I still found no reference to just how fast you could grind a stump with this machine. I watched several videos on it, and it seemed to cut through them fairly well. One of those was on the Barreto website. I have included it here.

This stump grinder was amazing! The controls were joysticks, and it moved on tracks. Therefor it was easy to move and very easy to uses. Most of the stumps took only a few minutes each to chew through. I was amazed! Furthermore the whole job only took about 16 hours, and I had a blast using it. Finally I found a solution, and was done in one weekend. and finally I had a very good time doing it!